Dow Kokam is producing battery cells at the company’s Midland Battery Park to supply a number of industries with advanced energy storage solutions.

The company — a joint venture between The Dow Chemical Co., TK Advanced Battery LLC and Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault — was formed in 2009 and broke ground on its Midland location in June 2010.

In June 2012, Dow Kokam produced its first battery cells in Midland using advanced lithium-ion battery technology. Once equipment was tested, the company launched commercial production around November 2012, said David Pankratz, Dow Kokam’s vice president of operations.

“The plant is up and running,” he said. “We are staffed at something less than a full shift, but we are running on a five-day-a-week schedule.”

The company’s Midland location is producing cells for three key markets.

“We’ve been selling cells into all of our markets, particularly into the transportation, storage and industrial markets,” he said.

Dow Kokam’s facility in Lee’s Summit, Mo., remains the primary production site for the production of cells for the defense market.

He said everybody on the team has done an excellent job focusing on safety.

“We put a high focus behind ensuring everybody got the training they needed, understood what they were doing, and made sure they have a clear understanding from a safety and quality perspective,” he said.

Dow Kokam expanded its cell production facility to add a 60,000-square-foot pack assembly plant because of strong interest from customers in buying complete systems, rather than just cells. Pankratz expects the first pack production line will be finished in February.

What sets Dow Kokam’s cells apart are the large-format nickel manganese cobalt lithium-ion technology, Pankratz said. He said in a market with different types of technologies, each offers a different balance of power, energy, weight, life and cost.

“NMC has the best balance of all those different properties to meet what the market is demanding,” he said.

Consistency in the product also is important, he said.

“As we’ve built the Midland Battery Park, we’ve worked to ensure we’ve built high quality manufacturing capabilities into the design of the plant,” he said. “We’ve been able to build from the grass up. We’ve been able to control every aspect of it.”

The company is built on the strengths of its parent companies, combining Kokam’s superior battery cell technology and design, Dow Chemical’s expertise in large-scale manufacturing and Dassault SVE’s battery pack and system integration knowledge, said Bill Gagliardi, Dow Kokam’s director of public affairs and branding.

“We took a good product, good manufacturing process and made it better,” Gagliardi said.

The company can scale up the production of cells and systems, has flexibility in its products and the ability to customize systems for each customer, Gagliardi said.

“Bringing all those capabilities together helped us get off to a much better start,” he said.

Inside the facility, the production process begins with the creation of slurries with anodes and cathodes, which are coated onto foils and punched out into electrodes. The cells are then assembled in a dry, clean room environment.

“The workers are dressed with a mask and hair bonnet and covers on their boots and white coveralls and gloves, all to prevent any kind of moisture or contaminant from getting into a cell,” Pankratz said.

The materials are then stacked with an anode, separator and cathode so the anode and cathode are close together but not touching, allowing lithium ions to transfer between them with as little resistance as possible. Electrolytes are added and the cells are sealed, run through a charging and discharging process and tested.

The cells are then ready to be sold directly to a customer or installed in a battery system, which contains electronic controls and thermal controls.